Slalom reviews

Once you pass the more junior stage, you will still have to take on illy written SOWs that require problem discovery that if you are lucky, your sales partner is good, and you get bill hours for it. If you are unlucky which is common, you don’t get to fix it and have to deliver against the client or the SOW owners imagination. Imagine that craziness as an experienced UX leader because the slalom XD leadership has no ethics when managing senior designers. They will use you as button pushers AKA design monkeys. There is very little respect in that process. I have personally seen them do this to 3 of the very senior & reputable & well respected leaders. At the end they just lost all interest at work and got managed out or had to quit.

When I first joined Slalom, my market was lean and scrappy and operated like a start up. This worked well at the time. Slalom grew from 4k to 12k employees in my time there, providing new opportunities to early career talent and expanding globally. With all this change, the recruiting, hiring, onboarding and internal operations remained the same- scrappy, under-resourced, and disorganized. Consultants and leaders billing full-time to clients had to take on internal operational roles just to keep the market afloat (e.g., run new hire onboarding sessions). By hiring only for sold roles (not bench), new hires could expect to start at the client on day one following a one hour PowerPoint onboarding. I had new hires with zero consulting experience reaching out to me asking where the training was, as they didn't feel equipped to take on clients on day one. As a leader, I was also tasked with selling and staffing roles. Without hiring to the bench, we rarely had the right resources available to staff at the right time. This resulted in either a mad dash to get offer eligible employees hired immediately, staffing the wrong people, or often losing the opportunity due to lack of resources.